© Numero Unoma
Get your mind out the gutter already!
No….I’m not talking about size. Size doesn’t matter really. (Well…I have to say it does when you’re referring to my portion of jollof rice). But really though, in general there’s always some other angle to compensate for either too little or too much of it. Take for example the size of your mouth. Here’s why it doesn’t matter that you have a big mouth: as soon as you open that big mouth and people realise just how big it is, it’s quite simple, everyone around you will vanish into thin air, and you and your big mouth can be friends with each other, no one is interested in your big mouthing because none of what you’re big mouthing about matters.
And if a certain other part of some people’s anatomy is too small, you will find that it helps if they buy a big car, to compensate for it, because nobody questions their IQ anymore. Naturally, I was talking about their brain, or what did you think?
Actually, while we’re on that subject, the truth is, for me a man’s brain is his s*x organ. That is where the real chemistry happens. In fact the bigger his brain, the better he is at using the rest of his anatomy, regardless of his size…errm, height. Short men generally compensate very well for their lack of inches. And clever men are just downright sesky. So when you get a short clever man like Kanye West, who is also creatively talented to boot…well how sesky is that!
We all have at least one ‘short-man-devil’ in our circle of family and friends, one who like Napoleon Bonaparte who famously said to his much taller military commander “You may be taller, but I am greater”, has compensated for his lack of vertical advantage by achieving great things. I really don’t know how tall Tony Elumelu is, but he looks like one of those to me. Forgive me TOE, if you are tall! Besides, how tall are Davido and Wizkid and Timaya?
Another successful talented and intelligent brother, though sans the Napoleon complex is that Wyclef Jean, such an underrated hiphop artiste. His lyrics are clever and cheeky and his POVs are original, even as they speak to the way we all feel universally. You might remember that track he did with one devastatingly handsome and toweringly tall The Rock. Yup, you got it, the track that was titled “It doesn’t matter”. A lot of black people psychology in that track there…as in it doesn’t matter how many Bentleys you have in the West Indies (or West Africa) because “if you ain’t sharing, people ain’t caring”. Nigerian ‘elite’, take note please. On the track, Wyclef also takes us on a trip down memory lane, to a time when he couldn’t get past the nightclub bouncers because he was a broke-ass negro. What does it matter that he was once broke. And what does it matter that he’s now rich. The drug dealers weren’t let off the hook either (unlike in Nigeria) or did I get that wrong, because according to Wyclef, they laundered their money via the music industry, but who’s asking now…it doesn’t matter, not now, not then. Then there was the woman he picked up in the nightclub, the wife with a derrière “the size of South America”, who took him back to her crib only to find her husband home, even though “he works on Wall Street, he’s only home two nights a week”. She was wearing enough ice to freeze New York but what did it matter. What did it matter that she was a married woman, out on the pull for some fun.
Well I can hear the creaking of eyebrows raising hypocritically. Of course it matters if my wife cheats on me after I bought her all those diamonds! My friend, it doesn’t matter if you bought her diamonds. If you don’t do the right thing, things will go wrong. So what, were the diamonds your downpayment for the right to play the field while she stays home, shuts up and puts up? Dey dere o.
Another angle though, do you remember back at school how devastating it was when somebody in your class had to repeat the school year? Could it be that you were that person? What do you think became of all those who repeated a year in school…or who got pregnant at university? Most of them ended up passing out of school with certificates, graduating from university, getting married and having a family. So what was all the fuss about? As in, what does it matter in the end?
I have millionaire friends. But it doesn’t matter. I have friends who used to be millionaires. It doesn’t matter! I have friends who have never been, and will never be millionaires, and it simply doesn’t matter. Not to me, not to universe. Nor should it matter to anyone.
The media says you need to lose weight? It doesn’t matter. You ‘re thinking to yourself how badly you’ve done, how you should have done better in life? How you should have made more progress in your career, married earlier, had more children, had more s*x even. But it doesn’t matter.
And in other news…I’ve got news for you. It doesn’t matter what you think of me. If I want to wear high heels and shortish skirts “at this age”, and if I don’t mind that my son has dreadlocks, or that my daughter is not yet married, it doesn’t matter. It certainly shouldn’t matter to you if it doesn’t matter to me, which it doesn’t. Because at 2 years of age I was a half-orphan, at 34 a full orphan, and I am still too young to be the widow I would have become last week, had I still been married to my ex-husband. May he rest in peace, and may his widow find comfort.
In Igbo we say that he who who thinks about another person’s death remembers his own. I started out earlier than most with that stuff, and so I realised that the only motto to roll with has got to be One life, live it! And by live it, I mean max it out. If death should come to us in such a way as that we are conscious of it (as opposed to a sudden unexpected death), then surely the knowledge of the ending of our time in this life will make one thing clear to the dying person: there is only one thing you can take with you, and that is memories, and even those, you must share with and leave behind for your loved ones. So let your daily focus be on the making of good memories.
Every minute that we spend here is a little container of a memory, so whether we choose to fill our minute(s), hour(s), day(s), week(s), month(s), year(s) and decade(s) with being happy, or worried, or optimistic, or anxious, or angry, sad, depressed, high on life or high on drugs, it is entirely up to us what memories we take with us – and leave behind – when our time comes.
So guard yourself from the making of the wrong memories by understanding that even though it doesn’t matter, it all depends on what it does matter.
Ultimately, all that really matters is that you find out what matters….and you make it matter.
Shall I tell you what matters? What matters is that you do cliché things like unto thine own self be true…and live every day as though it were your last…listen to your heart and follow your passion. What matters is that you feel the fear and do it anyway…unless you decide nahhh, this is really not for me, this bungy-jumping thing, in which case it then does matter that you didn’t do it, because you have a right to make your own choice, but guess what, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t do it. Errrm…right?